‘We need to be back on the cutting edge’: Why Bob Nutting cleaned house

Bob Nutting leaned forward, resting his elbows on the arms of an office chair, and broke his silence. “I do want to talk a little bit about how we got here,” the Pirates’ chairman and principal owner began, “and where we are.” The second part is easy to explain. We’re in a small conference room on the second floor of PNC Park’s administrative offices. But the first part — how we got here — takes a half hour to unravel. Prior to Monday, Nutting hadn’t spoken publicly since spring training, which feels like a lifetime ago. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

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But the bottom line is simple and clear and final:

Nutting cleaned house.

The timing might be puzzling, but the direction is now clearer. Nutting completed a trifecta of dismissals by firing general manager Neal Huntington on Monday, less than a week after parting ways with team president Frank Coonelly and a month after axing manager Clint Hurdle. Then, Nutting sat beside Travis Williams, the new team president, and answered questions for several hours, cycling media outlets in and out every 30 minutes.

No, Nutting did not commit to increasing payroll. He did not lay out a plan to rebuild the roster. But he admitted failure and acknowledged “it is critically important to our fans that we get this right.” Reality invaded the conversation. The Pirates are not a playoff team, and they were not painted as one. This was their owner turning the page and starting on a fresh sheet.

“We need to be more innovative,” Nutting said. “We need to be back on the cutting edge. We need to look at Tampa Bay, we need to look at Oakland, we need to look at the Twins. There are models out there where we can be more creative, more dynamic, more innovative. … I think the era of being able to (say), ‘Let’s get to .500 and see how it works,’ cannot work in today’s environment.”

Of course, as the general manager Nutting just canned can attest, putting together a better-than-.500 roster under the Pirates’ payroll constraints is a challenge. When asked about boosting payroll, Nutting said, “In the economic circumstance that we’re in, it’s challenging, honestly.” He spoke of the need to effectively allocate the dollars in the baseball-operations bucket. He spoke of how the “narrative on the economics of baseball” is inaccurate and needs to change. He did not speak about spending significantly more. (The Hurdle and Huntington buyouts, by the way, will cost Nutting roughly $10 million.)

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Otherwise, Nutting and Williams seemed tuned in to what fans wanted to hear. They trumpeted trust and transparency and accountability, attributes lacking all over the place in PNC Park. But the vision and promises ownership lays out in October won’t sate the fanbase’s appetite forever. Overhauling the front office and coaching staff is simply the first step on a long road ahead.

“We’ll look back and learn from our past, both the good and the bad,” Williams said. “Some things have been done really well. Some things we need to learn from and move forward and correct. We’re going to go through a process of evaluating everything, working as a team to develop a plan. We’re going to put the right people and resources in place in order to be successful.

“It’s going to start with doing all the little things right all the time. It’s going to end with accountability. Accountability to ourselves, including myself, and accountability to our fans.”

It’s hard to argue with the conclusions Nutting reached — the market inefficiencies exploited by the Pirates’ front office have evaporated, and so has pipeline of homegrown players — but the timing was arguably clumsy.

As other clubs announce their new GMs and managers, the Pirates have neither. Nutting fired Hurdle on the final day of the season and issued a statement saying he “strongly believe(d)” that Huntington and his leadership team were “the right people to continue to lead our baseball operations department.” Clearly, he no longer believes that. So why did he say it?

Nutting’s explanation came in two parts:

• At that time, a final decision had not been made.

• It wouldn’t have been fair to Huntington to not give a vote of confidence.

“Clearly, he was going to be under review,” Nutting said, “but if we undermined him even further, it wouldn’t be fair to the individual. It wouldn’t be fair to the work that he needed to get done, including getting the manager process started. And, frankly, it would be irresponsible, I believe, to get started with a new general manager search without a team president in place.”

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The answer doesn’t square with logic, on several levels, but it doesn’t particularly matter anymore. Nutting said the decision to fire Huntington was his. He wanted to give Williams the opportunity to conduct a GM search. What’s unclear is — if the Pirates knew by early October that Coonelly was leaving, as it appears they did — why they didn’t hire Williams sooner to quicken the process? The issue with the timing is that Huntington was allowed to direct the managerial search and interview candidates, and now that process is paused until a new GM is hired. The Pirates don’t think this is a problem. Others, not only Huntington, were involved in those interviews.

“I don’t think that we’re behind the eight-ball,” Nutting said. “I think we actually have a timing and flow that’s going to work very effectively. We have very good groundwork that’s been done by a good, competent team in our baseball operations to start working through the list.”

Williams spoke with managerial candidates Monday. Nutting didn’t entirely shoot down the idea of a rebuild as he has in the past. He’ll want the new GM on board before making decisions regarding the future of the roster.

For the time being, Kevan Graves, a highly respected assistant general manager, will serve as the Pirates’ interim GM. Nutting indicated the search will move swiftly. Once a new GM is hired, decisions must be made about Huntington’s lieutenants, if they have not bolted by then. On Monday, assistant GM Kyle Stark texted that he had not been given any indication one way or another about his job status. “I’ll be here until told otherwise!” he wrote. Larry Broadway, senior director of minor league operations, did not respond to a request for comment. Huntington did not return a phone call.

A few players did.

They, like the fans, had been waiting for clarity.

“I feel like this might give some finality to the situation,” said right-hander Jameson Taillon. “I think (players) were nervous about what was going to happen. People were on the edge of their seats. Now we can kind of move forward and understand the plan. We can all move forward in a new direction with a new group.”

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Multiple players declined to comment on the record, but indicated they, too, welcomed the new direction. Right-hander Trevor Williams, ever the humorist, offered this thought: “I trust that ownership will make decisions that are in the best interest of the club. I’m looking forward to meeting and talking with my Uncle Travis Williams and the next GM and manager.”

Toward the end of the season, Pirates players met with Hurdle and Huntington for “exit interviews,” but they also began to talk privately. Their conversations centered on how they could repair the clubhouse dynamic and rehab relations with the front office. “We realized that, sure, some people might take the fall for this,” one player said, “but, at the end of the day, a lot of the on-field stuff comes down to players setting the culture, setting the standard.”

Taillon, who underwent a second Tommy John surgery and will miss the 2020 season, wants to see the Pirates and Pittsburgh reunite in the coming years.

“I’d like to see this organization have a better relationship with this city, with the fans,” he added. “because a lot of us on the team care about the organization and really care about the city, and it’s tough for us to see the lack of trust with the organization that the city has. We’re not blind or deaf to it.

“Hopefully, this can be a fresh start.”

For the past 12 years, Huntington and Coonelly have been the public faces of the Pirates. Now, there is only Nutting. This is his truest test yet. He wrested control of the organization in the past week, and, now more than ever, the future is in his hands. Since Nutting took over as principal owner in 2007, only five teams have had fewer wins than the Pirates — and one of them, the Kansas City Royals, won a World Series. Now, the second act has begun.

If the Pirates can’t carve a path forward from here, there is no one left to blame.

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But if they succeed, it may prove a team can win Nutting’s way.

For now, there’s only hope that the next chapter has a happier ending.

(Top photo of Nutting: Philip G. Pavely / USA Today)